With the continuous advances in web page programming languages, such as HTML, XHTML, DHTML and other markup languages, and in particular in the more prevalent use of style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which assist in the separation of presentation of web content from the actual content itself, web pages are becoming more and more sophisticated, both in content and presentation.
Ideally every email reader would display any given email in the same way. That is, the presentation of a given email would appear identical regardless of which email reader, for example Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, etc., displays it. However, while vendors of web browsers tend to make frequent and ongoing updates to the browsers to support and keep up with the latest changes to popular web page generation languages in order to be able to render web page content from documents of multiple types and written in different languages, vendors of email readers have not typically been so diligent in providing support of all features of accompanying style sheet languages.
For example, many features of the popular style sheet language CSS, including repeatable background images, are not supported by some email readers. The result is often that presentationally-rich web pages written using style sheet languages cannot be sent in email messages and expected to be rendered by the email reader as it would be displayed by a typical browser.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide techniques for rendering presentationally-rich content readable and presentable across typical email readers.